Ngorongoro Crater and Beyond: Endoro Lodge

We spent the next three nights at Endoro Lodge. DC spent much of the first day sleeping off the infection. On the next few days, we went out for quick trips whenever DC felt up to it, for example out for a few hours in the crater and an excursion to see the Iraqw people. As you can tell, we spent quite a bit of time in the lodge itself. It was a beautiful place, with prettily-manicured grounds and plenty of different plants to look at. Here, I felt a bit less uppity compared to the chi-chi Manor – and you can see that I reverted to my safari pants and fleece.

Endoro Lodge is also in a coffee area and there were some coffee shrubs with bright red ripe berries for the picking.

The room itself was as charmingly rustic as the rest of the grounds. A four-poster bed complete with mosquito net dominated the hardwood floor of the spacious room.

And there was a roomy bathtub with a window overlooking a valley. There was also an outdoor shower but it was rather cold and we weren’t totally sure about our privacy – there was the occasional farmer walking along a path on the other side of the valley. We weren’t sure whether showering outside would make us very conspicuous!

What we really liked were the little touches by the staff. As you may have seen from the first picture of the bed, the room was decorated with flowers every day.

They changed the arrangement each day…

… and even put flowers on the bathmat!

Donna kindly arranged a massage for us, compliments of Maasai Wanderings. Too bad the room wasn’t heated and it was far too cold to be enjoyable. What a pity.

They also arranged for a special candlelight dinner at our patio. At first Betty, the lovely hotel manager, wanted to make us something familiar. She suggested a menu of Vegetable Soup followed by Manchurian Fried Rice with Oriental Vegetables. Thankfully, I managed to persuade her that we really much prefer trying the local cuisine. Instead of MFR with Oriental Veg, we had an amazingly tasty beef stew with some kind of local spinach, accompanied by rice and plantains. The beef was super flavourful – tasting deeply and meatily like how beef should – though slightly tough as all local beef tended to be. Stewing it was the way to go, and we enjoyed it together with the plantain, which looked a lot like sausage but tasted like a cross between tapioca and potato. Excellent stuff.